Volumetric lattice Boltzmann method for thermal particulate flows with conjugate heat transfer

TL;DR

This paper introduces a volumetric lattice Boltzmann method for simulating thermal particulate flows with conjugate heat transfer, enabling accurate, single-domain simulations of complex particle-fluid interactions and heat transfer phenomena.

Contribution

The paper develops a novel volumetric LB scheme that handles conjugate heat transfer and particle-resolved flows within a unified framework, with theoretical analysis and validation.

Findings

Validated the volumetric LB method through numerical tests.

Simulated sedimentation of particles with heat transfer in a channel.

Captured particulate Rayleigh-Bénard convection in dense flows.

Abstract

A volumetric lattice Boltzmann (LB) method is developed for the particle-resolved direct numerical simulation of thermal particulate flows with conjugate heat transfer. This method is devised as a single-domain approach by applying the volumetric interpretation of the LB equation and introducing a solid fraction field to represent the particle. The volumetric LB scheme is employed to enforce the nonslip velocity condition in the solid domain, and a specialized momentum exchange scheme is proposed to calculate the hydrodynamic force and torque acting on the particle. To uniformly solve the temperature field over the entire domain with high numerical fidelity, an energy conservation equation is first derived by reformulating the convection term into a source term. A corresponding LB equation is then devised to automatically achieve the conjugate heat transfer condition and correctly handle the differences in thermophysical properties. Theoretical analysis of this LB equation is also performed to derive the constraints to preserve the numerical fidelity even near the solid-fluid interface. Numerical tests are first performed to validate the present volumetric LB method in various aspects. Then, the sedimentation of a cold particle with conjugate heat transfer in a long channel is investigated. It is found that the sedimentation process can be divided into the accelerating, decelerating, and equilibrium stages. As a further application to dense particulate flows, the sedimentation of 2048 cold particles with conjugate heat transfer in a square cavity is simulated. The particulate Rayleigh-B\'{e}nard convection is successfully captured in this particle-resolved simulation.